Latest / Future of Work Tech with Fexingo: Remote Tools, AI Productivity, and Workplace Software / How Desk Sensors Are Reshaping the Open Office
Transcript
- Lucas: So you walk into the office, you find a desk, you sit down. Pretty straightforward, right? Except more and more companies now know exactly which desk you picked, how long you stayed, and whether you came back after lunch. Luna: And not just because of a badge swipe at the door. We're talking about sensors under the desk, above the desk, even inside the desk. Lucas: Exactly. This is episode fifty of Future of Work Tech, and I'm Lucas. Luna: And I'm Luna. Today we're talking about the quiet hardware layer reshaping the open office: occupancy sensors. Lucas: And we're not talking about some niche startup experiment. CBRE, the commercial real estate giant, released a report in late 2025 that said nearly sixty percent of large enterprises in North America now have some form of desk-level occupancy sensing installed. Luna: That's up from maybe twenty percent just three years ago. The adoption curve is steep. Lucas: Steep and accelerating. And the driver is pretty simple. If you're paying rent on a hundred thousand square feet of office space and you find out that on an average Tuesday only sixty percent of your desks are used, you start asking questions. Luna: Especially when that square footage costs something like seventy-five dollars per square foot per year in a city like San Francisco or New York. The potential savings are massive. Lucas: Right. So companies started installing sensors to get real data. The most common approach is passive infrared, or PIR — the same technology in your motion-sensing lights. A little sensor mounted under the desk detects body heat and movement. Luna: Other setups use Bluetooth beacons in the desk that ping the employee's phone, or ultrawideband tags for sub-meter accuracy. It's not one-size-fits-all. Lucas: And the data is surprisingly granular. Facilities managers can see not just whether a desk is occupied, but how long it's been empty, whether someone is just passing by, and even which desks are chronically unused. Luna: One company I read about in a Verdantix case study — a large insurance firm — found that forty percent of their desks were never used by the same person two days in a row. They had overprovisioned for a workforce that was actually hot-desking informally. Lucas: So they redesigned their floor plan. Cut desk count by twenty-five percent, expanded collaboration zones with sofas and whiteboards, and saved two million dollars a year in rent. That's the promise. Luna: But the promise comes with a privacy question. Employees are now being tracked at the desk level. Even if the data is aggregated, the knowledge that the sensor is there changes behavior. Lucas: It's a real tension. Some companies have dealt with it by making sensor data accessible only to facilities, not to managers. Others have put the data behind a strict anonymization layer — no individual desk history, just zone-level trends. Luna: And there's the question of consent. Do you need to opt in? Some European works councils have demanded that sensors be turned off during lunch breaks or after hours. Lucas: Which is a reasonable request. But the counterargument from real estate teams is: if we turn them off, we lose half the data we need to make smart lease decisions. It's a negotiation. Luna: Speaking of lease decisions, there's a fascinating use case that's emerged. Landlords themselves are starting to use occupancy data from their tenants to predict churn and negotiate renewals. Lucas: Yes — if a tenant's floor has been running at thirty percent occupancy for six months, the landlord knows that tenant is likely to downsize or leave. So they can proactively offer a smaller space or a rent reduction to keep them. Luna: It flips the information asymmetry. Tenants used to know their own utilization; landlords didn't. Now landlords with smart building systems can see it too. Lucas: WeWork has been doing this for years in their own locations, by the way. They use desk sensor data to rebalance capacity across buildings — moving members from underutilized floors to fuller ones, then closing the empty floors to save on lease costs. Luna: And WeWork's data actually showed that their average desk utilization across all locations was only around sixty-five percent in 2025. That's actually higher than the broader market, believe it or not. Lucas: Because they have hot desking by design. But in traditional offices, the number is closer to fifty percent. So there's a lot of room for optimization. Luna: Which brings us to a broader question: does more efficient use of space actually make the office better for the people in it? Or does it just shrink the office? Lucas: It can do both. Some employees hate the feeling of being tracked. Others appreciate that there's always a seat because the company right-sized the space. It really depends on culture and implementation. Luna: And that's where I think the next frontier is — not just sensing occupancy, but using that data to improve the experience in real time. Some companies are already doing things like automatically adjusting temperature and lighting based on which zones are full. Lucas: Or routing cleaning crews to desks that were actually used, instead of cleaning every desk every night. That's a small operational win, but it adds up. Luna: And if today's conversation gave you something usable — maybe you're thinking about your own office setup or just curious about the tech — we want to mention that this show stays ad-free because of listener support. Lucas: Yeah, we really appreciate it. If you'd like to chip in, it's buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, but it helps us keep digging into these topics. Luna: Right. So back to the tech — one sensor type I think deserves more attention is ultrawideband. It's more expensive, but it can track people to within thirty centimeters and even detect whether they're sitting or standing. Lucas: That level of precision opens the door to things like automatic height adjustment for standing desks, or even personalized seat preferences — someone always wants a left-handed desk, so the system reserves one for them. Luna: Although that cuts against the hot-desking ethos a bit. The whole point of hot desking is that you sit anywhere. But you can blend it — maybe you get a notification that your preferred zone has a seat available. Lucas: I think that's where we'll see differentiation. The commodity sensor packages are already cheap — a PIR sensor costs maybe five dollars in volume. The software layer that turns that data into a better experience is where the value is. Luna: So what's the bottom line? If you're a facilities manager or an executive thinking about this, what should you do first? Lucas: Start with a pilot. Install sensors on one floor for three months. Measure actual utilization against your lease cost. You might be surprised. And then have the conversation with your employees before you scale — not after. Luna: Because once the sensors are in, it's hard to take them out. But if you frame it as a way to make the office better — less crowded, more comfortable, more responsive — people tend to be okay with it. Lucas: Exactly. And if you're an employee listening, you now know what those little plastic domes under the desks are doing. It's not surveillance — it's data. And data, used well, can make the office a place you actually want to go back to. Luna: That's a good note to end on. Next episode, we'll look at something different — how AI is automating the office recycling bin. Seriously. Lucas: Smart waste. It's a thing. We'll see you then.